Sunday, November 08, 2015

David Hartwell announced at the World Fantasy Award ceremony on November 8 that this will be the last year that the award trophy will be in the form of the traditional — and controversial — H.P. Lovecraft bust designed by Gahan Wilson.

#WFC2015 #wfcon2015 David Hartwell just announced this is the last year the World Fantasy Award will be the H.P.Lovecraft statue!

— EK Tremontaine (@EllenKushner) November 8, 2015

Last year Daniel Jose Older collected over 2,500 signatures on a petition calling for the replacement of “avowed racist and a terrible wordsmith” H.P. Lovecraft on the World Fantasy Award.

None of the SJWs writing today, no matter how many awards they give each other, will have one-tenth the lasting literary impact that Lovecraft did. None of them has his imagination; the very best they have to offer can only offer pallid, perverted imitations of him.

If you have, how you can say that with a straight face indicates that you have incredible control over your emotions, good sir.

And before anyone tries to deride me as a Lovecraft hater because he certainly was a racist, no (well, not enough to agree with these SJW assholes). When it comes to his writing, the sense of otherworldly, cosmicist dread is second to none.

But let's be honest here, despite being as Anglophilic as you can be without boning the Queen the of England while sipping tea, crumpets, and stupidly giving Hong Kong to the PRC like an idiot, he wasn't Shakespeare. A good thing, then, he was skilled enough in other areas that he didn't have to be.

@3

Just go to your local bookstore and pick up his complete works. It's only 20 bucks. Barring that, since his works are public domain, just look up a list of all of them on the internet for free. There are tons of them.

On the subject, does anyone here know about a decent bestiary for all of his creatures that I can borrow (read, steal, thanks to the legal magic of public domain) for story purposes? I have an idea about a cuckservative finally manning up enough to try and summon some dark creature against a future US army dominated by wetbacks, trannies, fags, women, and wetback-trannie-fag-women and all the hilarious hi-jinks that ensue.

The only moderns who get close are our esteemed host, Jim Butcher, John Ringo, John C Wright, Hamilton and their nemesis Stross.

The only one of them who gets awards is Stross. You have to read him -- for he describes how a bureaucracy works far too accurately, and the meets the old ones with a shotgun and the correct attitude.

The professional twits running these cons... meh. It is like trying to get rid of the Rhodes Scholarship and demolish Rhodes house. Not going to happen unless society goes even more insane: wanton vandalism if it does.

Lovecraft the "racist" WASP married a Jewish woman, and had positive things to say about the same groups he had been raised to dislike or fear. He resisted suicidal impulses and lived with sickness and poverty by following his own strict ethical code.

Meanwhile, these supposedly enlightened friends of all humanity hate and fear the pioneers of the genre, and institute the damnatio memoriae which Lovecraft never would have used against them. They punish a man for his upbringing in poverty and loneliness, and his lack of perfect sanity, by themselves behaving in a gleefully psychopathic way.

What next? Travel back in time to kick Poe while he lies suffering in the gutter?

This is the ugliest trophy I've ever seen.The Hugo is a classic rocket.The Nebula a beautiful Lucite display of planets.The Stoker a "haunted house" (haunted by residents of McDonaldland, by its looks).Even the British Fantasy Award looks like something you'd gladly give a blood sacrifice.The reasons given are wrong-headed, but the award does need changing to a dragon or a wizard.For me, Lovecraft has always been about horror, and Wilson's sculpture is ridiculous.

World Fantasy Awards people are, like everything, being taken over by people whose only skill is getting onto the committee to regulate people who can do actual work. Real writers will not be able to stop this because, as i read recently...

"... if you do not understand that they would rather destroy the organization than permit it to survive as a bastion of crimethink and badfeelz, you will almost inevitably lose."

Did they get they get outraged over the "negroid" boxer being reanimated or was it Arthur Jermyn immolating himself when he discovered he was the grandson-offspring of his grandfather and a demi-human gorilla thing?

I noticed a recurring theme of a fear of inbreeding with Lovecraft's work, and I'm starting notice a certain amount of IDEOLOGICAL inbreeding with these SJW asshats. And just like in The Lurking Fear, they ALWAYS wind up eating their own....

There are a lot of reasons SF is worth taking over, but all of those reasons are books the SJWs want to burn.

Once they're done purging SF of everything worth reading, they can squat on the dunghill that remains and wonder why everybody is over there, reading unmentionable trash by unheard-of nonentities with funny names like Heinlein, Vance, and Lovecraft...

It's sad to hear that Hartwell is a part of this. I used to buy his Year's Best anthologies every year. He picked good stuff, while there was any good stuff to pick.

I wouldn't touch anything with his name on it after this, not with a ten foot oxygen lance.

I wonder how long it will be before Shakespeare is declared an un-person by these SJW barbarians....but then, I repeat myself...Pyrr, where have you been? Shakespear was a black man.http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/

My recommendation would be to start with call of cthullu. It's the most widely referenced, and contains most, if not all, of the Lovecraftian elements. I would caution against trying to read them all at once. I tried that, and spent weeks chasing unearthly abominations out of the house. The HOA was NOT happy.

FWIW, for those asking for a Lovecraft reading guide, here's a cut-and-paste of my own Lovecraft list, arranged chronologically in the order in which he wrote the tales. The asterisks represent my own "grade" of how much I enjoy the works, with four asterisks being the top score.

Those wanting to delve into Lovecraft might enjoy reading all the tales three asterisks and up, in chronological order.

I'm an ardent Lovecraft fan, but I think that At the Mountains of Madness is a bit overrated, if only by his unsurpassable standards. Best writer of the 20th century, IMO.

* The Beast in the Cave** The Alchemist*** The Tomb** Dagon* Polaris The Green Meadow** Beyond the Wall of Sleep** Memory* The Transition of Juan Romero** The White Ship*** The Doom That Came to Sarnath** The Statement of Randolph Carter**** The Terrible Old Man* The Tree** The Cats of Ulthar** The Temple* Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn**** The Street Poetry and the Gods** Celephaïs**** From Beyond** Nyarlathotep** The Picture in the House* The Crawling Chaos Ex Oblivione*** The Nameless City** The Quest of Iranon*** The Moon-Bog*** The Outsider** The Other Gods**** The Music of Erich Zann*** Herbert West—Reanimator* Hypnos*** What the Moon Brings Azathoth The Horror at Martin’s Beach** The Hound** The Lurking Fear*** The Rats in the Walls** The Unnameable Ashes The Ghost-Eater** The Loved Dead**** The Festival Deaf, Dumb, and Blind*** Under the Pyramids*** The Shunned House*** The Horror at Red Hook** He** In the Vault* The Descendant** Cool Air*** The Call of Cthulhu Two Black Bottles** Pickman’s Model**** The Silver Key** The Strange High House in the Mist** The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath**** The Case of Charles Dexter Ward**** The Colour out of Space The Last Test** The Curse of Yig** The Dunwich Horror The Electric Executioner* The Mound*** Medusa’s Coil*** The Whisperer in Darkness** At the Mountains of Madness*** The Shadow over Innsmouth* The Trap**** The Dreams in the Witch House* The Man of Stone** The Horror in the Museum** Through the Gates of the Silver Key** Winged Death** Out of the Æons*** The Thing on the Doorstep** The Evil Clergyman* The Horror in the Burying-Ground* The Book* The Tree on the Hill*** The Shadow out of Time** “Till a’ the Seas” The Disinterment** The Diary of Alonzo Typer** The Haunter of the Dark**** In the Walls of Eryx*** The Night Ocean

HPL certainly hated the way immigration changed the culture of his native New England, and he absorbed a lot of the racial sentiments that were common to the people he grew up around. He moderated these beliefs later in life, as he matured and had more experience in the world. He married a Jew, and seemed to have a good working relationship with Harry Houdini, another Jew, who employed him as a ghostwriter. As his biographers have noted, he held these views in the abstract but was generally kind and courteous to individual members of the groups he denigrated.

He was also a hard-core materialist atheist to the end of his days, so much so that one of his letters describing his dismal atheist worldview was given a whole chapter in Christopher Hitchens' anthology of atheist thought.

So what?

People are allowed to be wrong about beliefs and we can still enjoy their talent and writing.

I have no more interest in writing HPL out of history for his racism than I do of writing him out of history for his atheism.

Although that might be an interesting tact to take - start tweeting congratulations to the World Fantasy Con for removing the award from an atheist. Sowing a little discord in the ranks of any SJW groups should be SOP.

Ummm you're not writing an "Exploration of the Fiction of Lovecraft" are you? Not that there would be anything wrong with that. There's rumors that a small publishing house might even deal on such a thing.

"He was also a hard-core materialist atheist to the end of his days, so much so that one of his letters describing his dismal atheist worldview was given a whole chapter in Christopher Hitchens' anthology of atheist thought."

I notice that the Christians are not on the warpath to remove the statue based on Lovecraft's atheism. Does this mean the SJWs are more loyal to their political correctness idols than we are to our God? Or only that we are civilized, and willing to live and let live?

Dream Quest was one of my favorites, but a very different tone to me from the more mythos- horror pieces. Some of his stories- not sure if they were chronologically written later but were later in my three book hardcover set, spent too much time fawni g over the perfect socialist societies some of the creatures had.

Innsmouth, Call of Cthulhu, and some others are still some of the scariest and creepiest stuff I've read.

SJW writers confuse being non-white/gay/a woman with characterization and plot. Their social justice religion prohibits writing about anything that is "problematic" (this buzzword is a major SJW tell).

This is why their work is safe and boring and predictable. This is why their work is more lifeless than even the most bowderlized story from the past. Sales have fallen accordingly.

Guys, Larry C is great. Don't get me wrong. But he's not creepy enough. It is not in his nature. He's basically a cheerful guy with simple needs. Vox is a scholar of this shit, Ringo is influenced by the fae or worse. Butcher is brilliant and John C Wright has forgotten more mythology than most of us know.

Stross is in that group... because the laundry is frightening. It chews up and destroys the wizards within. Larry is getting there with some of his non urban fantasy. Ringo has been there isnce he killed of Mike (whatever his name's love) in "Choosers of the Slain".

The closest old thing to Lovecroft is Fu Manchu. Burroughs and his ilk don't come close. You have to go older, darker, and creepier. Being English here has an advantage: if you cannot be English, be Catholic or Calvinist: and the person who made modern fantasy, Tolkein (who was not Lovecraftian) was both.

In 1992, seven years after his death, two books were published about the poet Philip Larkin. The first, a biography by his former colleague Andrew Motion, who would himself go on to become poet laureate, revealed an inner life far removed from the popular image of Larkin as a slightly Eeyorish uncle who just so happened to be a remarkable writer. The second was a collection of Larkin's extant correspondence, having ordered his secretary to shred all she could when he was carried from his home for the last time. This, too, showed a man vastly removed from that whom the public thought they knew.

Just what was it that Larkin had done? Well, he was a racist. Yes, a man born in 1920s England, whose father had admired Hitler to such an extent he kept a small statue of him on his desk, replete with an arm one could extend into a salute, turned out to employ terms like "wog" and "nigger" in his private correspondence. The response, even back in 1992, was drearily predictable: the marxist professor of history Lisa Jardine called for Larkin to be removed from the national curriculum; the black American playwright Bonnie Greer concurred, bizarrely suggesitng that it was overdue as Larkin was never that good anyway; the critic Tom Paulin referred to the poet as the "monument under the national sewer" of British life.

So where is Larkin's reputation today? Well, in his adoptive city of Hull a new statue of him welcomes visitors to the city. In 2010 Larkin25, a literary festival spanning the entire year, was held in Hull and in 2017 Larkin will doubtless be central as Hull becomes — stop sniggering — the UK City of Culture. Just last month the BBC broadcast yet another programme about him, adding to an ever-growing pile of documentaries and docudramas. This month another major book will be published, this time dedicated to Larkin's photography. In July Westminster Abbey announced that Larkin will be commemorated at Poet's Corner. A quarter of a century after the literary elite of Britain decided to write off Philip Larkin he remains the nation's favourite poet. When a new Larkin poem was discovered in a book earlier this year he made the front pages, as he did again the next day when it was in fact revealed to be the work of a obscure author who had copied Larkin's style. Lisa Jardine, meanwhile, croaked her last in October in a moment of such seismic import to the nation that it completely passed me by, until I checked just now to see if the old bird was still around.

It can be done. The Philip Larkin Society was founded in 1995 in order to defend the poet's reputation and they have done a remarkable job, as have devotees like Clive James, Christopher Hitchens, John Banville, Alan Bennett and Martin Amis. Most importantly of all, Larkin remains on the national curriculum and his works are still in print. The battle is not over: those names above belong only to white men who are variously ageing, nearly dead (Clive James) or dead (Hitchens) and I don't doubt that Larkin's enemies are merely biding their time until the last old white man is dead and they can make their move. They should not be so confident: the Larkin Society has ensured a younger generation is poised ready take up cudgels when the time comes. We may never be able to relax but we can keep them at bay.

Larry's MHI has creepy moments with the burrowing eye tentacle monsters and also magical shade mushroom trees, and then Nemesis has a great description of an out-of-time alien god worthy of HPL's non-Euclidean geometry. Have you even read it?

Why not abandon these, SJW awards and create some awards based on merit and not social justice.

Because (a) The MSM and the current SJW Gatekeepers would do everything they could to stuff the new awards down the ignorehole, and (b) even if the new awards did become sufficiently popular, the SJWs would try to move in and take those over as well. (If you open up voting for a sci-fi award to everybody, how do you keep the SJWs out?)

Oh, as far as where to start with Lovecraft... I'm a very VERY casual reader. I found "The Colour Out Of Space", "Cool Air" and "The Thing on the Doorstep" to be entertaining and accessible enough. You'll find that "COOS" and "Cool Air" have been adapted for film quite often. (Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" TV show had a few of Lovecraft's tales adapted for screen, although hardcore fans may not be too happy with some of the changes made to the stories.)

I would like to note for SJWs out there that Lovecraft, because of his horror of vast formless evil blobs of various kinds, also can be seen as a strong anti-feminist. Consider, if mere Innsmouth was handled roughly by US military, what would have been made of the gibbering madness that is WisCon?

" Why not abandon these, SJW awards and create some awards based on merit and not social justice."

Because (a) The MSM and the current SJW Gatekeepers would do everything they could to stuff the new awards down the ignorehole, and (b) even if the new awards did become sufficiently popular, the SJWs would try to move in and take those over as well. (If you open up voting for a sci-fi award to everybody, how do you keep the SJWs out?)

I'll take the other side of your argument.

(a) MSM/SJW are losing control of the Narrative, the Overton Window, and the Media itself. The ignore hole is full up. They can't just infiltrate like in the bad old days. The success of #gamergate, SJWAL, Trump, etc. are our metrics.

(b) The SJWs have overplayed their hand, and they can't stop themselves from doubling down yet again. That is all they know how to do, honesty being a foreign concept to them. This exposes them anew as frauds to an ever-widening audience of appalled onlookers. A takeover move would be obvious, especially for something called "The Anti-SJW Fantasy Awards" or the "Anti-SJW Code of Conduct". Their old tactics won't work anymore.

This is why I think Hartwell's Gambit may be to assist in trashing the current award in order to facilitate the introduction of a new, quality-based award. The Hugos taught us: let the SJWs do the arduous work of razing the old, dead SJW institution. We waved a few torches and pitchforks in their general direction and poof goes the witch.

I'm not say the future isn't arduous for us, just pointing out the kind of leverage we have, what they have lost, and what they can never have.

@89. First three books of MHI read: he lacks something in the horror. Yes, it is horror, but it is different: something I cannot put my finger on. Bob Howard performing necromancy on himself as a form of suicide so he can destroy a skull worshipping cult, while in pain since the elite of the cult had decided to have a bit of his flesh as a snack... while his wife is firing up a violin made of the bones of seven innocents tortured to death... that's Stross, and that is not the most frightening bits. The bastard can write.

Unfortunately. He's a SJW and a tool, but he can write. You don't have to be a nice person or have good morals to be a good writer.

@89 To clarify: I'd rather have a meal with Mr and Mrs Correia, would travel to have a meal with Vox or Mike, even into that heathen place called the United States of America. (The TSA: the best argument to take your holidays ,,, elsewhere). I am fans of them as people and authors.

Though I better not bring Larry a NZ Pinot Gris or Chardonnay. Or decent coffee.

None of the SJWs writing today, no matter how many awards they give each other, will have one-tenth the lasting literary impact that Lovecraft did. None of them has his imagination; the very best they have to offer can only offer pallid, perverted imitations of him.

Which is precisely why they want to exert power over him. I don't understand why Vox Day thinks China Miéville is a good writer. And here is China on HPL:

The award is a bust of H.P. Lovecraft, a notable author but also notorious racist. Nnedi Okorafor, who won the award in 2011, wrote that she approved of China Miéville's solution, who claims: "I put it out of sight, in my study, where only I can see it, and I have turned it to face the wall. So I am punishing the little fucker like the malevolent clown he was, I can look at it and remember the honour, and above all I am writing behind Lovecraft’s back.”

No doubt Howard Phillips Lovecraft is smiling down on these illiterate and untalented imbeciles. He doubtless would have been horrified to have his likeness bestowed on monosyllabic buffoons from Ape City. These ever simplistic village idiots with their cacophony of babble in their echo chamber of sycophantic backrubs and knob polishing have not the slightest bit of the imagination or talent of the Great man himself.Taking the philological genius of Poe and the sardonic themes of Dante, Lovecraft melded them together in a Mythos so elegant they are practically a religion amongst horror writers. Even such banal entertainers such as Joss Whedon pay homage to him with references to the Great Old Ones who came before the Gods and humanity in the early disorder of the Young Universe.No doubt these buffoons and their plastic trophies will be forgotten like a race of backwards primitives leaving behind nothing. In the future, I would love to make a funeral pyre for these idiots with all the drivel, porn and nonsense their bucolic peptic media belched onto the sickened eyes of a captive audience. The Dinosaur Media with their endless lies and pathetic excuses dies a little more each day as people snip their ties to the open air sewer of Burbank and the Hudson River's sewer rats will soon dance alone in the aether of obscurity.

When the time comes to establish our own awards, it appears that we can now offer the HP Lovecraft award for Horror to the list... We must consider the naming of the Epic Fantasy and Science Fiction awards while we are at it. While we are at it, we need a named award for best ant-SJW polemic.

Why not abandon these, SJW awards and create some awards based on merit and not social justice.

You have to make a judgment, case by case, as to whether your efforts are better spent fighting within the organization to save it or starting anew and working to surpass the old. It's a risk & effort versus reward calculation, and it doesn't come down the same way in every case.

In the case of an award system like the Hugos, it takes relatively small effort to throw a spanner in the works, so why not stay in and do that? Low effort brings high reward, both from the book package you get and the butthurt it causes. (And nothing says you can't go ahead and start a new reward after they've burned down the old one to spite you.)

On the other hand, when an organization like a publisher or a church is already SJW-run and you're already on the outside where you're powerless, the reward/effort ratio approaches zero, so it makes more sense to start your own competitor.

I find these "SJW" fools to be hilarious. What are they getting for their meager efforts? Its like those idiots at the Comic Book companies that have decided to take the White Guys out of comic books to focus on "vibrant" minorities like blacks, homosexuals and feminists. Only problem is that the entire audience is White Guys, and those "vibrant" communities don't read comic books, or much of anything else really. They go through college reading the Cliffs Notes and watching the boring inane movie version, and that's how they get through life. Thats why their books are garbage, made up of little plot and are nothing but preachy in-your-face screeds about the unfairness of the World when you belong to a caste of losers.That's really what the Left is you know. L O S E R S. Those inane nobodies you laughed at and ignored in high School are what the Left really is all about. When they get to college, these undersized pencilneck geeks and fat ugly women are filled with angst over being losers. They never fit into a clique in High School so they latch onto anyone and anything that will accept the losers in the genetic lottery. Marxism and Humanism is the Cult of the Sub-Genius. Their messiah is The Cult of Bob, the nobody who leads the nobodies who nobody really likes.

Many thanks. No, I'm not penning a complete tome on Lovecraft (Who has the time?), but the more crit that is written about him from a trad perspective, the better. Joshi is predictably leftist (i.e., hand-wringing about so-called "racism" -- i.e., legitimate cultural self-exploration and cultural preservation for any other race but whites) in much of his HPL analysis.

Kadath and Dunwich are fine, but IMO he wrote many superior works (see my list).

@85 Thank you for the post on Larkin. The first of his poetry I read was not long after I had to study the romantic poets (and reconfirmed how much I dislike romantic poetry, music, etc). My recollection of his little verse on Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" still makes me smile:

I sometimes wonder how much the perception of HPL's stories changes with time. HPL managed to establish the genre as we know it, but knowledge of horror of contemporary readers plays slightly against him. I remember reading "The Outsider" first time, I really liked the descriptions etc. and then I read to the part when the HPL's tells the reader that what the protagonist saw was his own reflection in mirror. I think that nowadays pretty much every reader already guessed it and it kind of ruins the ending of otherwise brilliant story in a way it wouldn't during HPL's live.

I find these "SJW" fools to be hilarious. What are they getting for their meager efforts?

It's a mistake to underestimate the long term effects of the narrative these losers relentlessly push on the impressionable shallow thinkers of society (let's face it, that's most people). Look at what is happening at the University of Missouri. Any pragmatist, looking at the numbers, can see the real problem, but that's not how it's going to play in the media. The SJW problem and strategic dissemination of opposition to it needs to be taken seriously.

Cthulhu is just grumpy because people keep waking him up when he is trying to sleep.

I find these "SJW" fools to be hilarious. What are they getting for their meager efforts?

If you ever played minecraft you would know its not just another brick.

Only problem is that the entire audience is White Guys, and those "vibrant" communities don't read comic books, or much of anything else really.

They used to have little boys modeling underwear on the back on comic books, I wonder why they stopped that. Before comic books the heroes of little white boys were the white men that invented things. Kids would have chemistry sets and learn reality on their own instead of getting narrative messages from jewish comic book authors.

I don't underestimate their effect, I just find them to be laughable as opponents. Only the weak and stupid would follow this line of false deluded rhetoric that has no basis in reality. When fools like Yglesias gets his leg broken by niggas "keeping it real" and then plays the broken record of "they're not all like that" or "I know a good one", its like listening to the World's smallest violin playing the same old song you've heard all your lives, that sounds stupid and demeans you just by inplying you're stupid enough to believe it.I'm not underestimating their effect. I intend to KILL THEM. Simple, but effective. You don't need strategy or chess games with stupid deluded retards who count on thier enemies that don't care about them to protect them and support them. These people are TOO STUPID TO LIVE.Natural Selection is not science, its obvious observable reality. In life, some people are TOO STUPID TO LIVE. The only cure for STUPID is EXTINCTION.

@27: Followed your link and I simply MUST requote these excellent observations from Lovecraft himself:

"Only a damn fool can expect the people of one tradition to feel at ease when their country is flooded with hordes of foreigners who — whether equal, superior, or inferior biologically — are so antipodal in physical, emotional, and intellectual makeup that harmonious coalescence is virtually impossible. Such an immigration is death to all endurable existence, and pollution and decay to all art and culture. To permit or encourage it is suicide."

"Biologically, the Nordic is probably not superior to the best Mediterranean stock; or the unbroken and now almost extinct Semitic white stock; but just as the Chinese culture ought to be preserved where it is once entrenched, where the Nordic culture is once entrenched, it must be preserved."

"Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman — heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world — an “inferior” of any sort… & yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences — & even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer’s physical aspect forms a constant reminder of his outside origin."

"I think that nowadays pretty much every reader already guessed it and it kind of ruins the ending of otherwise brilliant story in a way it wouldn't during HPL's live."

I disagree. Any perceptive reader in Lovecraft's time would have deduced that conclusion. In fact, Lovecraft invariably pens his stories in such a way that they expect the reader to be more aware of what's actually going on than the narrator. Anticipating the narrator's eventual reaction to the magnitude of the horror, of which the reader is already aware, is part of the effect.

@112 I sometimes wonder how much the perception of HPL's stories changes with time. HPL managed to establish the genre as we know it, but knowledge of horror of contemporary readers plays slightly against him. I remember reading "The Outsider" first time, I really liked the descriptions etc. and then I read to the part when the HPL's tells the reader that what the protagonist saw was his own reflection in mirror. I think that nowadays pretty much every reader already guessed it and it kind of ruins the ending of otherwise brilliant story in a way it wouldn't during HPL's live.

I had a similar reaction with "Whisperer in Darkness." I called many parts of the ending by the middle of the story. I thought the professor, Wilmarth, a complete idiot for not picking up the completely unsubtle clues that his contact in the mountains had been compromised. Come on. All the letters had been handwritten before, now there's a typewritten letter FROM A MAN WHO HAS ALL ALONG BEEN WARNING YOU OF ALIEN INVADERS WITH HUMAN AGENTS. Not even a moment of hesitation.

Wilmarth still got on the train (and happily brought along all the recordings and photographs of the aliens his contact had sent). He still went with the complete stranger (after his contact had warned him people in the town couldn't be trusted), he still went in the house even though there were no dogs (the contact ALWAYS kept dogs because they weren't fooled by the invaders disguises). He sat and listened to a robed and shrouded in darkness Akeley.

I had to remind myself of two things:1) when it was written, readers most readers would be genuinely surprised. Modern cliches of writing didn't exist back then.2) If the professor had been smarter, the story would have been much shorter and would have been no story at all.

Lovecraft only wrote about the non-euclidean madness the SJWs live in.---

That's actually a very good point. For instance, having simply male and female is impossible for the SJWs to understand. I wonder if their brains are phased partly into an alternate reality. Naaa, it's just an opaque bubble they are maintaining.

I don't think any of you really get Lovecraft if you're expecting suspense stories. H.P. Lovecraft isn't a mystery writer. His genre is Horror and Terror stories about bad things that happen to innocent people who get caught up in shit they didn't imagine possible. As the reader you know an unimaginable horror awaits the poor deluded people who get in way over their heads, but that's what is fun about Lovecraft. These are those "level-headed" sarcastic scientific pricks who don't believe in the occult and expect a mild and simple explanation and come across a sanity defying Cosmic Horror that they never believed was possible because they thought it was just superstitious nonsense made up by gullible naive idiots. "There's more to Heaven and earth than in your philosophy" is the Shakespearean quote that sums up Lovecraft and his circle of Cosmic Horror writers. He and his small coterie of pen pals including Robert E. Howard of Conan fame started the entire Cosmic Horror wing of Sci-Fi.

@82 Red Comet SJW writers confuse being non-white/gay/a woman with characterization and plot. Their social justice religion prohibits writing about anything that is "problematic" (this buzzword is a major SJW tell).

This is why their work is safe and boring and predictable. This is why their work is more lifeless than even the most bowderlized story from the past. Sales have fallen accordingly.---

You're witnessing that Impossibility of SJW Convergence. It's on a smaller scale. Even the ability to tell a story would fall to these termites as the eat away at reality.

See, they have that innsmouth similarity look going on. These 4 look the same as the last 4. It's like their inner demons all look alike. The only thing missing from the gallery is a pink haired she twink, a blue haired land whale, and a neckbearded pedo.

SJWs are about breaking up white tradition. There is nothing I can see pointing to a system to replace it. SJWs thrive on chaos and destruction. These would be found in many of Lovecraft's stories: the vile, numberless horde, bereft of dignity or culture.

Living in NYC in his twenties, far removed from his home of Providence, opened his eyes to what his upper-middle class sensibilities feared deep down: that there will be those trying to overwhelm the more refined.

No wonder SJWs want to eliminate him. He speaks truth. Fat, ugly lesbians and effeminate pajamaboys scream for acceptance while HPL sees the coming chaos in the stars.